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Machine See, Machine Do

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In ''The Age of Intelligent Machines,'' Mr. Kurzweil valiantly attempts to provide an overview of artificial intelligence - the field devoted to the theory, design and construction of computing machines that think, or at least appear to. He discusses its philosophical, mathematical, psychological and technical roots; the outstanding problems in contemporary research on artificial intelligence; the history and current state of the industry; the impact of artificial intelligence on the arts, and the future of the discipline. The volume is an innovative blend of monograph and anthology, for it includes not only Mr. Kurzweil's own writing but a number of essays by philosophers and researchers in artificial intelligence. This structure would have been more successful, however, if the author had included views divergent from his own alongside those that buttress his position.

On his own turf Mr. Kurzweil is clear, current and informative. He understands how artificial intelligence can be used in pattern recognition, reading, speech and music synthesis. But when he strays into philosophy, logic and psychology, he is often sloppy and vague. He relies on dated and secondary sources, ignores or misunderstands many of the most important thinkers and distorts the relevant history of philosophy and logic. Mr. Kurzweil also is too quick to draw inferences about human psychology from artificial intelligence models, and he is superficial when he discusses one of the most exciting developments in current artificial intelligence theory - the emergence of connectionism, which explains intelligence as arising from a web of interconnected, individually very simple, processes.

Mr. Kurzweil's enthusiasm for the artificial intelligence industry also leads him to disregard his own advice against overly optimistic projection as well as his own remarks on the deep differences between human and machine intelligence. While noting that ''understanding language can . . . require a knowledge of history, myths, literary allusions and references, and many other categories of shared human experience,'' he says on the same page that Terry Winograd's 1970 Shrdlu program (an early attempt, later repudiated by its designer, to model language comprehension) represents progress toward a genuine understanding of natural language, and he asserts that ''we can expect translating telephones with reasonable levels of performance . . . early in the first decade of the next century.'' There is no suggestion of the mammoth difficulties that confront anyone who tries to accomplish such a task.

Chess is a leitmotif in the history of artificial intelligence, and in this book. Mr. Kurzweil writes that ''when a computer does become the chess champion . . . before the end of the century, we will either think more of computers, less of ourselves, or less of chess.'' But then he undermines this odd speculation by observing correctly that the methods by which computers play chess differ dramatically from those by which humans play. This difference is evidenced by the fact that even though humans can play go (a Japanese board game) with no greater difficulty than chess, computers, which can play chess extremely well, are embarrassingly weak at go. In other words, the fact that planes and birds fly makes us think neither more nor less of birds, planes or flight. Bird flight and plane flight are simply two quite different feats.

Artificial intelligence raises pressing philosophical and social questions about the concentration of wealth and power, the nature of war, the character of work, personal privacy and what it is to be human. To ignore these is to succumb to what Langdon Winner has aptly called ''technological somnambulism.'' In all fairness, Mr. Kurzweil is aware of some of these issues. ''Computer technology,'' he writes, ''is already a powerful ally of the totalitarian.'' And in another passage, he notes that computer identification technology is ''capable of helping Big Brother track and control individual transactions and movements.'' But none of these issues make Mr. Kurzweil question the unbridled development of this technology.

Artificial intelligence boosters and critics are often puzzled by one another, and often talk past one another. Mr. Kurzweil has heard the voices on the other side, but he has not quite understood the force of their arguments or the problems they pose. Even sympathetic critics of artificial intelligence look like Luddites to him. But, after all, judicious Luddism may not be such a bad thing.

Jay L. Garfield teaches philosophy at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. He is the author of ''Belief in Psychology'' and a co-author of ''Cognitive Science: An Introduction.''

A version of this review appears in print on September 9, 1990, on Page 7007036 of the National edition with the headline: Machine See, Machine Do. Today's Paper|Subscribe